Harpo Speaks! (11 page)

It was no joke. Mr. Haverhill stared morosely into his shot of whiskey and said he would have to let me go at the end of the week. He regretted this deeply. I had been a good, diligent employee, he said, and I had a great future ahead of me-in any capacity except as rent kicker. When I collected my final salary he gave me an unexpected bonus: a package of matzohs, to take home for the next Jewish holidays. I had never known a nicer man. I felt he was a true friend, and therefore I felt sorry for him when he had to fire me.

I didn’t feel sorry for myself because I never had and didn’t know how to.

Wicks, the trucking man, who was the immediate cause of my leaving the brokerage business, was also the indirect cause of my becoming a professional musician. Through him one of his clients, a Mr. Wentworth, hired me for a special job delivering some flowers to an address in Brooklyn. He promised to pay me for this with a ride on a horse, any Sunday I wanted.

When I got to the house in Brooklyn there was an Irish wake in progress. It had been in progress for some time, and the mourners were no longer very mournful. They insisted I join the shindig. I was afraid not to. Somebody poured me a tumbler full of rotgut booze. Even the smell of it made me dizzy. The crowd yelled for me to drink ‘er down. I looked around desperately for a means of escape. I would have been happy to change places with the corpse in the coffin. Then I spotted a piano. How about if I played a tune for them? Everybody whooped and drank to the idea. What this wake needed was a little music to liven it up.

I parked my derby on the piano, upside down, and banged out “Waltz Me Around Again, Willie.” I wanted to switch to “Love Me and the World Is Mine” but they wouldn’t hear of it. They only wanted to hear “Waltz Me Around,” again and again, faster and louder. The faster and louder I played, the drunker the mourners got and the more they cried and the more dimes they dropped in my derby.

I came home with a hatful of silver. I now perceived what Chico saw in the piano, much as he detested it and much as he would rather be playing pinochle. There was money in it.

Being at liberty again, I gave this serious consideration. I asked Chico what he could do to break me into his field. I couldn’t have asked him at a better time. He was then working at a beer garden in Yorkville but he had just been asked to play in a nickelodeon across the street, where the piano player, a kid named George Gershwin, had been fired because customers complained his music hurt their ears.

It was a natural setup. Chico and I looked more like twins at that time than we ever had. So one night I slid onto the piano stool in the brauhaus and Chico played in the nickelodeon, and nobody knew the difference. Nobody knew the difference, that is, until I had played my repertoire of two numbers in the same key six times over, ignoring all requests for other tunes. Then a dame who felt like singing “Love Me and the World Is Mine” asked if I could please play it just a little higher, to fit her register.. The only way I could play it higher, of course, was to play it an octave higher-still in my one and only key, the key of C.

That did it. The manager paid me off and asked me to leave the premises. He couldn’t figure out how I had degenerated to such a lousy piano player overnight.

I appealed to Chico again. The trouble, he said, was that the beer garden patrons were used to his style, and it was unfair that I had to follow him. He had a new proposition. He would make the rounds and audition. Any job he was hired for I could take over, fresh.

This worked fine, up to a point-the point where managers and paying customers found out that I could play only two tunes in one key. Chico got the jobs. I turned up to play. I got fired.

It was discouraging. I was making a few bucks one night here, one night there, but the turnover was killing. It couldn’t go on forever. In a year’s time, I figured, Chico would have conned me into every joint in town and I would have been canned out of every one of them and that would be the absolute end of my career at the keyboard.

Then a momentous thing occurred. I answered a PIANO PLAYER WANTED ad. I auditioned on my own, and on my own I got hired.

Exactly how momentous this was destined to be I didn’t know, bless my simple, trusting soul.

Unknown

CHAPTER 6

Love Me and

the World Is Mine

THE ADDRESS in the ad I answered for a piano player was on the Bowery. It turned out to be a saloon. When I told the bartender why I was there he jerked a thumb toward the back room and said, “Mrs. Schang.”

In the back room stood the biggest woman I had ever seen. She was about six-foot-two and none of it fat, but all bone and muscle, a Powerful Katinka in the flesh. She was leaning on a piano, smoking a cigarette and drinking straight gin.

“Mrs. Schang?” I said. I was so struck by the sight of her that my voice came out even squeakier than usual. “Mrs. Schang? You advertised for a piano player?”

She looked at me through narrow eyes, hard. She slammed her shot glass on the piano top. “You little Jew son-of-a-bitch,” she said, in a voice at least an octave lower than mine. “Get out of here!”

I started to walk out. “Hey, wait a minute!” she called. I stopped. “What’s your name, kid?” she said.

I told her my name was Marx. “Marx? What Marx?” she roared.

“Adolph Marx,” I said.

Mrs. Schang poured herself some gin and sipped it while she studied me carefully, up and down and sideways. I was wearing my usual outfit, derby, turtle-neck sweater and sty, with a new pair of shoes that had high heels and extra lifts to make me look taller. In the towering presence of Mrs. Schang, my new shoes didn’t do much good. I felt about two feet tall.

Finally she said, “All right, let me hear you play.”

I launched into “Waltz Me Around Again, Willie.” She stopped me halfway through. “If you want the job, okay,” she said. “When will you be ready to go? The job ain’t here. It’s in my place.”

I said I was ready right now and asked what street her place was on. Street, hell, she said. Her place was on Merrick Road, out in Freeport, Long Island. Did I still want the job? I said I sure did. “Okay,” said Mrs. Schang. “Eight dollars a month plus room and board.”

I had passed my first solo audition.

My new boss and I rode the train to Freeport. She didn’t talk to me, not a word, during the trip. We were met out on the island by a tall, skinny kid about five years older than me, who drove us by horse and buggy to a joint on Merrick Road. Mrs. Schang didn’t speak to him, either. It was a week before I found out he was her son.

My new place of employment was a joint called “The Happy Times Tavern.” There was a bar in front, and a dance floor in back with an upright piano, where four girls solicited prospects. The girls made their money upstairs, where they took their customers. Half of what they made, I learned, they had to fork over to “the Madam,” as they called Mrs. Schang. The Happy Times Tavern was a road-show version of the Friendly Inn, back in Chinatown.

My job as Mrs. Schang outlined it was simple. “When I tell you to start playing the piano, you play,” she said. “If a fight starts you get behind the piano and stay there-understand?-until I tell you it’s safe to come out. I take care of all the fights around here.”

In spite of her ominous briefing, the joint seemed pretty quiet my first day there. Mostly I sat around the back room talking with the girls and playing for them. We got along great. Two of them I liked especially. They couldn’t hear enough of “Love Me and the World Is Mine,” and sat with tears in their eyes while I played it again and again.

Then, about six-thirty, Mrs. Schang yelled, “Here they come! Start playing! Good and loud!”

The girls braced themselves, as if they were getting ready to face a firing squad. I started playing, good and loud. And in they came-about twenty of the dirtiest, meanest-looking men I had ever seen. A canal was being dug near Freeport at the time and this was the crew, thirsting for liquor, women and roughhouse.

There wasn’t any serious trouble with the canal diggers until Saturday night, the only night they stayed late. They were paid on Saturdays. A free-for-all broke out after two customers came to blows over whose turn it was with one of the girls. Following orders gladly, I ducked behind the piano. The brawl didn’t last long. Mrs. Schang waded into the thick of it swinging a bung-starter. By the time she’d heaved six guys out the back door, two at a time, the rest of the crew got the idea and quieted down.

The seventh guy she grabbed was me. She hoisted me out from behind the piano and dropped me onto the stool. “I’m paying you to play, you son-of-a-bitch,” she said. “Play!” I obeyed. I had never played worse, but I had never played louder, either.

I soon settled down into a routine at the roadhouse. It wasn’t so bad, really. In some ways I’d never had it so good. I could make eight bucks a month and keep eight bucks, since my living expenses were taken care of. In a few months I could resign and go home independently wealthy.

Besides the girls, there were three others on Mrs. Schang’s staff, and they were friendly toward me too. Mr. Schang, the Madam’s husband, a silent fellow with stooped shoulders and sunken eyes, was the handyman around the joint. Their son, Christopher, took care of the horse and did all the driving. A German guy named Max, who was about my size but a good deal older than me, was the bartender. Both Mr. Schang and Christopher took orders from the Madam the same as Max and all the rest of us. And like any of us, they would pass the warning along if the Madam started hitting the gin. When Mrs. Schang went on a binge, she would roar around the joint like a wounded bull. It was wise to stay out of her path on such occasions.

While things were never exactly quiet in the Happy Times, I felt it was a good, secure place to work, Then I began to sense that something fishy was going on. There was more to this operation than met the eye.

One night during my second week there, the Madam called me into the bar after the diggers had left. She said she had some business to attend to on the outside, along with Christopher and Max.

“I want you to mind the saloon until we get back,” she said. “Don’t forget-gin ten cents, whiskey fifteen, beer a nickel. Don’t try to get away with anything, because I’ve marked the bottles and checked the register.”

Now I was a part-time bartender, which in the saloon business was a hell of a step up from being a full-time piano player. The three of them returned in an hour or so. Max took over again, and I went back to my stool in the back room, and it was business as usual.

But not everything was as usual. An odd change had come over the Madam, her son, and Max, between the time they left and the time they returned. The Madam was strangely silent. She stood by the bar slugging down the gin, saying nothing. Max’s hand shook when he poured her drinks. Christopher wandered around like a lost soul. I’d never seen such a quick change in a guy. He seemed to have aged fifteen years in the hour he was gone.

Next week the same thing happened. The Madam told me to take over the bar. If anybody wanted to dance, she said, they could go to hell. I was not to leave the saloon. The three of them were gone longer this time. When they got back, it was worse than before, the change that had come over them.

The mysterious nighttime “business trips” got to be part of the routine. I tried to find out from Max what was going on. The more I pumped him, the more he shook and the more he tightened up. I asked the girls if they knew. They didn’t know and didn’t care. It was plain that Mrs. Schang didn’t want me to know any more than I did. When she caught me hanging around Max, pestering him, she cursed me out and told me never to set foot in the saloon unless she gave the order.

The next day Max didn’t show up for work. Christopher took over behind the bar. I never saw Max again, never again heard mention of his name. After Max’s disappearance Christopher stewed in a perpetual state of the jitters and the Madam got roaring drunk and stayed drunk. The mysterious business trips stopped.

A week later Mrs. Schang finally sobered up. She had absorbed so much gin it stopped having any effect, and this seemed to make her madder than ever before. She came in the back room and grabbed me off the piano stool. “Get in the buggy, out front,” she said. “You’re driving tonight.”

By the time I got my derby and got in the buggy she was already there, waiting for me. Then she told me to run to the kitchen and get a meat knife. When I did, she slit her pocketbook and stuck a pistol and a pint of gin between the cover and the lining. She said to get going, and fast.

I asked where we were going. Mrs. Schang said, “Keep driving east until we get to the Pot O’ Gold. I’m going to kill Louie Neidorf.”

I didn’t know who Louie Neidorf was, and I didn’t care. I had never seen anybody fire a gun before. The prospect was so thrilling I could hardly hold the reins. We pulled up in front of the Pot O’ Gold-a roadhouse on the other side of town, about five or six miles away.

“Don’t tie up the horse,” said Mrs. Schang. “We’re going to have to leave here in a hurry. Come on inside.”

We went inside. We sat at a table facing the door. Mrs. Schang plunked down her pocketbook in front of her. She narrowed her eyes, and waited. Every time a guy walked in the door, I said, “Hey! Is that him? Is that him?” and she gave me a swift kick in the shins under the table and growled, “Shut up, you.”

We sat there for over half an hour. A lot of guys came in, but Mrs. Schang’s hand never came out of her pocketbook. I was getting desperate. I was pleading with her now whenever anybody walked through the door. “Isn’t that him?” I was saying. “That must be him!” Oh, how I wanted to see that gun go off!

Finally she spat on the floor and said, “Somebody, God damn it, has tipped him off. He’s not coming. Let’s go home.”

The Madam charged out of the Pot O’ Gold cursing a blue streak, with me running to keep up with her. Her eyes were wild and her hair was flying all over the place. She plotzed herself in the carriage and took out her gin bottle and took a long swig. I never saw anybody get so drunk so fast. All of a sudden she got the idea she had fired at Louie Neidorf and missed him.